Veterans like Simon Brown, who was blinded in Iraq by a sniper, says ‘survivors’ get up, they don’t give up and welcomes the Royal British Legion’s announcement of the Iraq15 national event, as it is important to remember those who gave their lives in the conflict
Britain’s biggest military charity, the Royal British Legion (RBL) are announcing a national event to mark 15 years since the Iraq War.
A Service of Remembrance is to be held at the National Memorial Arboretum on May 22nd. The military mission which began in 2003 saw Saddam Hussein captured and executed in 2006. The conflict began in 2003 and officially ended in May 2011.
The RBL are inviting veterans, the bereaved and loved ones to come together to remember. The Iraq War claimed 179 members of our armed forces, who were faced with snipers, subjected to rocket attacks and the constant threat of IEDs
A further 6,000 were injured, including John Devlin, 36, from Liverpool, shot in the shoulder by a sniper. He said: “I know I’d be dead without the Royal British Legion.”
The charity got him help and he was diagnosed with PTSD. He was just 18 when he he was deployed to Iraq: “It was torture, the worst experience of my life, I was only a young boy. I remember a mate from my regiment got killed just before I was due to land, and he’d only been there four days.”
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Mark Atkinson, Director General of the Royal British Legion, said: “Experiences of modern conflict, such as Iraq, can be complex and difficult to talk about, and many people are only just coming to us now for help. The RBL is here to provide life-long support to the Armed Forces Community, whatever the need, whenever it’s needed.”
Iraq veteran Simon Brown, 46, was blinded by a sniper in 2006. He was shot in the face, the bullet entered his left cheek and exited through the right. He said a ‘fog descended’ and he slipped into a coma. He woke up 17 days later in a Birmingham hospital.
“My world fell apart. I’d lost my career; I’d lost my job and I’d lost my future,” he said. “I just felt cheated and robbed. When you go through adversity, all your focus goes on what you’ve lost. It’s very hard to look at what you’ve kept.”
With help from his family and the RBL he ended up turning his life around, even becoming mayor of his home town of Morley in West Yorkshire. He now wants other veterans to know “you are not alone” and that despair can be replaced with hope.
Describing that incident in Iraq which changed his life Simon, a corporal in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, said: “On December 6th we went out and that was the day that I didn’t finish the patrol.“
Mechanic Simon was in a 40-tonne Warrior tank on a mission to rescue six stranded soldiers near Basra Palace. There were two ‘recovery assets’ there to help the distressed vehicles. Simon said he had a chat with his oppo in the other tank to see who would take the lead on the mission and says “we flipped a coin basically and I won the toss.”
He said a bomb maker had been arrested which prompted gunfire. They managed to “subdue the enemy” but as they went to pull out of the area the Platoon leader’s vehicle wouldn’t move, so they were arranging to tow it.
“That’s when the enemy realised what was going on. So they opened up again. We had to quickly do the job. I got back into the commander’s hatch of my vehicle.”
But he explained dust had been kicked up and his driver could not see, leaving them to end up in a ditch on the side of the road.
“I put my head out the turret because I couldn’t see through the sighting system to see if it was clear and which way to go. I felt the impact on the side of my face as the bullet struck me here,” he said, pointing to his left cheek, “and it came out here” pointing to his right.
“I knew I’d been hit but I didn’t know how and I didn’t know the extent of the damage, so I dropped down and obviously I squealed a bit. And that’s where my world gets very small. My legs were getting damp and warm. And it was the blood from my face. So I tried to put a bandage on but I couldn’t open the packaging.
“Because of the layout of the vehicle, nobody could get to me. So I passed the bandage to the third man, he passed it back up open, so that I could put it on my face.
“In that time I twigged that I wasn’t breathing, my jaw had broken in four places, my palate had collapsed. So the danger was suffocation. I couldn’t breathe so I had to put my thumb in my mouth to hold it up and keep my airway open all the way back to base. I kind of concentrated on what the hell was going on. The drivers moved off.“
When they got out of the immediate danger, his colleagues tried to reach him.
“It was basically a tube, and they were struggling to see how to get this six foot tall, 18 stone bloke out of there. I kind of ripped my body armour off and started climbing up out of the turret. I was sort of thinking ‘it can’t be that bad because I’m not dead’. So surely this is just a few stitches, a bit of time chatting up nurses, and then back out on the job. Obviously I was very wrong.
“Never at any point during this, did I contemplate my eyes were damaged. I just thought they were shut. And even today, I don’t recall not being able to see anything which is weird. I was put onto a stretcher. At this point I think the adrenaline’s starting to run off and I’m starting to panic.
“I thought I was talking, but obviously with a broken jaw and no palate I clearly wasn’t making any sense to anybody, and then next thing I know the lights went out, that fog started coming in, they’d obviously put certain drugs into me.”
He was put into a drug-induced coma and “for the next 17 days it was dark”. Simon was flown back to Britain and taken to Selly Oak Hospital, Birmingham.
“I could hear people while I was in the coma but there was no context, it’s like being in a dream. So I genuinely felt when I woke up I’d been asleep for about six months.
“I woke up on Christmas Eve, which you can imagine how much fun it was half-blind, laid in hospital bed. When I woke up all I had was light perception, I literally knew the lights were on or off and I could see shadow if it was really close. “
Both of Simon’s cheekbones were shattered, his jaw broken in four places, both eye sockets were damaged. His left eye was completely removed, he has about a dozen metal plates in his face and only about 20 per cent vision in the remaining eye.
“The only future I envisaged was, basically, a beneficiary of my mum and dad’s spare bedroom for the rest of my life. The demons started taking control. I only had one emotion, it was anger. I was angry at everything.“
But everything changed for Simon, when he was sitting listening to the radio his dad had got him, “feeling sorry for himself”. Suddenly he heard a couple of names he recognised. “It was two people who’d been killed in an IED attack.
“That was the catalyst moment. The moment you realise you’re a survivor, not a victim, you know, and survivors get up. They don’t give up.“
